By WILLIAM ARNOLD, SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER MOVIE CRITIC

Updated 10:00 pm, Thursday, January 13, 2005

In "Elektra," Jennifer Garner reprises the role of the Marvel Comics heroine she made moderately famous in the 2003 Ben Affleck movie "Daredevil" -- a lethally skilled warrior princess and woman-of-mystery with super-model looks and little gift for gab.

The film is so muddled and filled with confusing flashbacks that it's hard to know for sure, but it seems to make no obvious reference to the Affleck character -- or anything else in the original story -- so it's not, strictly speaking, a sequel.

Still, its premise has the world similarly locked in mortal combat between the secret forces of good and evil -- the good guys being (and wearing) white and led by a blind wizard (Terence Stamp), the bad guys being mostly Asian and operating out of a Tokyo skyscraper.

The back story that emerges from the flashbacks is that Elektra was formerly in training with the wizard, but, for reasons that aren't entirely clear, she washed out of the program, and instead became the planet's most accomplished professional assassin.

As the movie opens, she's given the lucrative assignment from her agent (yes, assassination agent) of murdering a likable and handsome man (Goran Visnjic) and his 13-year-old daughter (Kirsten Prout) living on a remote island in the Pacific Northwest.

She takes the job but, after accidentally meeting the pair before knowing they're her targets, she can't pull the trigger and spends the rest of the movie protecting them from her ex-employers, who, of course, turn out to be the forces of evil.

Garner has a charisma and mystique that makes up for her woodenness as an actress, and she moves well. There's a certain amount of pleasure to be had from the spectacle of her leaping around the scenery kicking butt in that red Victoria's Secret boudoir outfit.

But, otherwise, "Elektra" is a poorly written collection of comic-book movie cliches that offers nothing new to the genre, generates very little in the way of action thrills and plays like a self-important, humorless rip-off of "Kill Bill."